Yahoo! search gets personal

Yahoo is offering a beta version of its personal search engine, branded My Web. It updates Yahoo Search which launched late last year.

The search engine will remember what you have previously searched for, allow you to store previous search results, annotate those results and send them on to other people.

Users can save a copy of any web page and they can add their own notes to it. The search will integrate into Yahoo blog tools so users will be able to make pages public too.

Julian Smith, online advertising analyst at Jupiter, said: "It's a nice step to a more personalised search. It will stop people leaving Yahoo to go to Google and so lower churn. It's got a nice community feel to it and we'll see more from search providers looking to win hearts and minds of their consumers."

Smith said it was disappointing the service does not link to Yahoo's desktop search yet.

Yahoo is also trumpeting its open APIs to encourage rapid development of new products using the service.